Archie Bunker in a cowboy hat

Way out in a tumbleweed corner of Nevada is a rancher named Craven Bundy—I mean Cliven Bundy. By now you've probably heard about his staredown of the BLM over his theft of $1 million in grazing fees he owes. He was backed up by a ragged mob of red necks all armed to the teeth. They fantasized that they were at the OK Corral but in reality they were nothing more than the moronic townsfolk in “Blazing Saddles”. The whole thing was a hit of the week on Fox News and CNN. They were even called patriots by our first term second rate Senator Dean Heller. Not content with his 15 minutes of fame, Craven, I mean Cliven Bundy rattled off a full throttle statement about negros, welfare and the Federal government plus authentic gibberish about freedom and the social benefits of slavery. Oh oh this frightened off the right wing media and made Dean Heller swallow his words. Meanwhile, our long term first rate Senator Harry Reid, who had called the mob domestic terrorists, didn't have to retract a syllable of what he said. My disappointment with Bundy is that he isn't funny, wise or thoughtful-- just an old windbag wearing a ten gallon Stetson on a two gallon head. Where does all this take place—in the wonderfully-named Bunkerville where the spirit of Archie now resides.

Why I still read the local newspaper

It's certainly not for the police blotter with all the stabbings, beatings and murders. Not for the melancholy of the dozens of pedestrians killed on the roads including 2 year old toddlers. Not for the tiresome right wing diatribes. No, it's for the comic strips, especially one called “Frank & Ernest”. They misuse the language in a delightful way, including “Malaprop Man” who is a caped klutz who mangles his words and syntax. This week Frank instructs Ernie that the longest waterway in the Ukraine is the Dneiper, not the Crimea River (see my last blog and listen to Julie London) and at the F&E bakery Frank questions a seasonal promotion titled “April is the crullerest month” (TS Eliot's Wasteland). I also like Hagar the Horrible but he is in the category that Marshall McLuhan liked least: the berated husband nagged by Maggie on Jiggs, Dagwood's boss Dithers and the sarcasm of Hagar's wife Helga. But hey, I like to laugh at something in the paper. I mean besides Senator Ted Cruz.

Crimea River

Putin has put the moves on Crimea and it's his. All the blather about protecting Russian citizens is baloney, This was an “anschluss” right out of Hitler's playbook on Austria. I think every leader should get out his copy of “The Guns of August” and not go off half-cocked like the jingo Senator from Arizona or the blowhards on Fox News. Let Putin have his ego trip, the bills will come in soon enough. An interview with some old folks in Crimea said that they wanted to join Russia because “they had better pensions”. They also happen to be broke, so pony up Putin. There was a visual on the internet this week that showed how national borders changed in the past 1000 years. You've never seen such furious map-making. I've seen the Russian fleet mothballed in Vladivostok and it isn't pretty to see all that military waste in one place. It will surely come to Crimea in time and then what, “Russo-Disney”. Remember the playful plea from the Hitler in Mel Brooks' “The Producers”: “I want peace, peace...a little piece of Poland and a little piece of France!” Perchance?

Putin is poutin', Ukraine is floutin', everyone's shoutin'

Things are getting dicey in Ukraine or as Jimmy Fallon says, “maybe we should start calling it “Twokraine”. But what would you expect of a shirtless, narcissistic autocrat like Putin. He plays hardball and realpolitick and couldn't give a fig what Europe and the US think. Someone told Stalin that the Pope disapproved of his military exploits and Stalin said, with a sly smile: “how many divisions does the Pope have?” We get it. I've just finished a little book called “1913..the year before the storm” that's the storm called The Great War one hundred years ago. Everyone wonders how it started. It was mostly poor choices and the fact that the Kaiser and many others were delusional and had fantasies in their creative and let's stop listening to the jingo nonsense of John McCain who has Teddy Roosevelt's axiom backwards: “Speak loudly and carry a birch twig” It probably comes down to the only person Putin fears and listens to, his wife, the Russian recording star Dolly Putin.

Where to look for work

It's depressing to hear politicians chatter about jobs, jobs, jobs when they have no clue how to create them. Employers are being cautious about hiring and when they do, it's for American salt mines like Wal Mart. The Roosevelt Republic is over and we now live in the Second Rater's Republic. No more WPA or NRA or Hoover Dam or even Eisenhower's interstate highway program. Detroit is still making cars in the middle of a medeval landscape and famine. Silicon Valley is helping create mega wealth for themselves and scarcely any jobs for the rest of the country. This hamlet of High IQ Luddites is gleefully destroying the workplace of millions. In the 1970's we thought we'd get flying cars but all we got was Twitter. During the Depression Orwell discovered that all work had dignity, even picking hops and washing dishes in a restaurant. I leave policy to the wonks but who will actually help people with low skills? There's plenty of work to be done. In Oregon an attendant pumps your gas, both as a courtesy and a wage-paying job. There's a way that government can help manicurists, barbers, hairdressers etc get a foothold by paying the license fees and training they require. Some of this takes local government help but there are actually dozens of ways to help the unemployed if a little creative brainstorming is used. I read where one economic “expert” said not to help workers, only companies that can then attract more customers. Workers are customers, stupid. Longfellow gave us the answer when he said, “We must be up and doing” Every one of us.

Suspicion breeds confidence

That's a slogan from Terry Gilliam's film “Brazil”, a comic take on Orwell's “1984” but with the same gruesome ending (they own his mind). Where to begin, with Orwell of course and what he saw coming before the NSA, drones, listening devices and wiretaps. What he saw was the emerging of the managerial elite bred in WWII—the unelected, unaccountable “experts” who are now in charge of our government. The head of the NSA, the arrogant James Clapper, was the kind of man Orwell feared most. Dave Eggers new novel, “The Circle”has a company credo “All that happens must be known”, which is Big Brother in the guise of Google and Facebook. I'm not on Facebok or Twitter, but my privacy has been hijacked just the same. Edward Snowden should get a medal (he won't) for revealing that the NSA is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world. The public blindness to the harm of our out-of-control technology is baffling. The NSA is there to petrify the population into a permanent state of war, or they say in Newspeak “War is peace”. The Pentagon has an annual budget of $650 billion while Congress cuts food stamps and guide dogs for the blind. American global ambition has reached a tipping point and it is backfiring. This security psychosis is no longer a stable basis for our society. On a more serious note, there is a controversy about renaming the Washington Redskins football team (not politically correct it seems). I have a wonderful, modern, new name for the team the “Washington Stealers”! Too subtle? Too close to the Pittsburgh Steelers? They ran a focus group of 500 million and it was suitable.

Meet the Texas Taliban

The saying is that Pakistan is not a country with an army but an army with a country. That's what we're becoming: a gun-owning army with a country. I saw a piece on MSNBC where four women were having lunch in Dallas to discuss gun control when, out of nowhere, a gang of people armed to the teeth congregated across the street brandishing their assault rifles, other weapons and crude signs about the Second Amendment. This is a scene I couldn't imagine happening in any civilized country. After little children have been gunned down in Newtown and there is a shooting rampage on the news every night, the nation is numb. After all, in 2010 11,078 Americans were victims of homicide with firearms and another 73,505 were intentionally shot and survived. Twenty five other countries with a larger combined population had 1300 homicides. Each of these countries has either removed or restricted the possession of handguns My advice is to keep the Stars & Stripes at half mast every day of the year. The NRA is calling the shots (pun intended) in this country.